The war in Iraq is a noble cause, a way to plant the first seed
of democracy in the Middle East. If the U.S. loses in Baghdad, it
will be because Americans at home lost the will to continue
fighting.
These are some of the ideas that Dinesh D’Souza, a
bestselling author, shared Wednesday evening with an audience of
about 200 at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
D’Souza’s right-wing views may not be popular on
campus, but that’s why Bruin Republicans brought him to UCLA
to speak, said Faith Christiansen, the group’s chairman.
“There’s a certain bias in the classroom, where
certain things don’t get covered. … We wanted him to come
and talk about the war on terror, and do it from a different
perspective,” she said.
With more than 2,000 soldiers lost in Iraq, few people would
deny that the toll of combat has been high, said D’Souza, a
Hoover Institution fellow who served as a senior policy analyst for
Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, just four years
after he graduated from Dartmouth College.
But noting that the U.S. lost more troops on the beaches of
Normandy in one day than it has lost in Iraq since battles started
there in 2003, he said the question is whether the fight is worth
the losses.
“I say yes,” D’Souza said. “These are
high costs that Americans have borne in the war, but the costs are
to be weighed against the goal.”
Establishing democracy in the Middle East, where dictatorships
still dominate the political landscape, is a difficult task, he
said. But if the U.S. can establish a democracy in Iraq, other
states in the region may follow suit, he added.
What U.S. policymakers must accept is that if democracy takes
root in Iraq, it may not be the same kind the U.S. has,
D’Souza said.
While he added that he would like to see an Iraq in which women
have the same rights as men, he believes the influence of Islam in
the area means voting may not produce the kind of government
Americans are used to.
“I don’t get to vote in Iraq,” D’Souza
said. “It’s not my country. … You have to live with
democratic outcomes.”
D’Souza believes that, as the world’s superpower,
the United States’ chances of winning the war in Iraq are
good if U.S. citizens continue to support the cause.
“The real war is being fought at home,” he said.
Cody Smith, a first-year undeclared student, said he wanted to
attend D’Souza’s speech because most campus functions
seem to be associated with liberal causes, such as animal rights or
divestment from Sudan.
“I’m moderate, so I wanted to hear both sides of the
spectrum,” Smith said. “I guess there are not too many
conservative events here.”